Washington Post, Again, Quietly ‘Updates’ Hunter Biden Laptop Story After Devon Archer Testimony

For the second time in three years, The Washington Post quietly updated a story from October 2020 in which it undercut reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden.

The original story was penned by Washington Post's chief fact-checker Glenn Kessler on the very day the New York Post reported on information obtained on a laptop Hunter left behind at a Delaware repair shop, ahead of the 2020 election.

The New York Post article reported that Joe Biden attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which had paid his son $83,000 per month -- which he and his camp have repeatedly denied.

Kessler disputed the reporting by furthering the now-debunked theory that the laptop was a plant from Russia, citing interviews with Biden aides.

As per The New York Post on Thursday, "The initial fact check relied on statements from Andrew Bates — then a spokesman for the Biden campaign and now deputy White House press secretary — and Michael Carpenter, a former Biden foreign policy adviser and now a permanent US representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)."

Specifically, "Bates said there was no record of the 2015 dinner on the vice president’s public schedule. Carpenter said he did not recognize Pozharskyi’s name, except apparently from The Post’s reporting. Other Biden reps denied the event happened at all."

The first update from March 30, 2022, read as follows:

The latest update follows testimony from Hunter's former business partner Devon Archer. Earlier this month, Archer testified before the House Oversight Committee that the Biden/Kessler characterization of the matter was “not correct.”

According to Archer, Joe Biden was a guest at the dinner, he met Pozharskyi, and stayed for the entirety of the dinner in a private room at the back of the restaurant.

As a result, the new article in The Washington Post provides the update -- not the correction -- that Joe Biden was, in fact, in attendance at the 2015 dinner at Cafe Milano in Georgetown.

However, Kessler downplays the update, saying “There was less to the story than one might imagine.” 

The latest update from the Washington Post now reads as follows:

Kessler also added a parenthetical “update" several paragraphs into the piece noting that Archer disputed The Washington Post's sourcing while in deposition.

In 2023, Kessler was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi award for fact-checking reports about Hunter Biden.

Kessler doesn't plan to give back the award or hand it to more credible journalists, like those at the New York Post who soundly reported on Hutner Biden's laptop in 2020.